Introduction:
A secret place remains beyond the knowledge of most of the people. It is only known to a few. I had a secret place back at home.
My grandfather had built a study room for himself in our old house. While building it, he realized that there remained a small area behind the room.
He thought of creating an enclosure behind the study room to be used as an attic. However, the door which leads to that room was so narrowly concealed between the two book shelves in the study room that the attic remained aloof. My grandfather called it the secret place and had told only my brother and me about it.
My Reading Room:
The reading room is a small, cosy room with a big teakwood desk, a table lamp, two huge bookshelves and a fireplace. It is the only place in the entire house which is cut off from the voices of the family members. This room once belonged to my grandfather who used to be an avid reader. His huge collection of novels, books, encyclopaedias, plays etc. has been passed down to my father.
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The table lamp, though old and rusty, still brightens up the whole room. There are two oil paintings embedded on the two opposite walls of the room and a miniature wooden sculpture of one of the greatest minds of the 21st century, Albert Einstein. Amidst the book shelves lies the entry to the secret place.
The Secret Place:
I and my brother had neatly maintained the secret place. It was very small in size and the ceiling was low. There was a small bed and a shelf. We had plastered posters to the gloomy walls of the room and had neatly stacked the shelf with books and chocolates. We always used to sneak into this room during the weekends.
Incidents in the Secret Room:
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I recall many small incidents taking place in the secret room of our house. On one instance, my father had stormed into the reading room in anger, almost knocking off the hourglass placed on the desk. He was angry because my brother had misplaced a book he had bought recently and had stormed in to re-check the same in the book shelf.
However, he couldn’t find the two of us as we hid in the secret place much to his ignorance. On another instance, I remember how a snake had crawled into the secret room from our backyard and had very comfortably placed itself between two books on the lowest shelf. My brother had almost fainted screaming when he noticed the same while cleaning the room.
Conclusion:
The secret place still remains a secret. No one else in the family knows about it except my brother and me. The secret room however remains abandoned these days. The books have turned old and the shelves have become rusty. The only time the room is opened is when I visit the house. But even after so many days, when I visit that room, a lot of memories flood my mind.